The winner of the world’s first MBA contest for management innovation was announced last week. The competition, the HCL MBA M-Prize, was organized by the Management Information Exchange (MIX), an open innovation platform seeking to “crowd-source the future of management.” It relies on idea-challenges called "M-Prizes" to stimulate contributions from their community of management practitioners.

In this competition, with 114 teams competing from business schools around the world, the winning team was from Harvard Business School. The team won an opportunity to implement their business idea at HCL, a real-life $3.1 billion IT global services company, with $50,000 to fund the initiative.

I talked recently about the competition with the mastermind behind the MIX, ProfessorGary Hamel as well as with Krishnan Chatterjee, HCL’s CMO.

Gary Hamel

SD: What’s this competition all about?

GH: Our starting proposition is that management is a hugely important social technology. On the site, we call it the technology of human accomplishment. It encompasses the tools, the methods and the processes that we use to bring people together to accomplish human purposes. The idea is that this technology is on the flat part of an S curve. It was mostly invented a hundred years ago. Its aim was to turn human beings into semi-programmable robots. While it helped to create organizations that are disciplined, focused, reliable and predictable, we now need organizations that are adaptable, inspired and still accountable. The MIX is a project to crowd-source the future of management.

SD: Is this competition unique?

GH: We have run several other M-Prize competitions with interesting results. This is the first time we ran them with MBA students. We are trying to underline a message to those students that the way organizations operate today may not be the way they operate in the future and that the embedded assumptions that are at the heart of a lot of business school teaching are open to challenge. One goal is to surface some great ideas and to hear what the next generation of leaders is thinking. By virtue of creating the contest itself, there is a meta-level message that today we need to be teaching our future leaders how to become inspired management innovators. They need to go out thinking about how they are going to challenge the existing assumptions and how they are going to reinvent the technology of management, given all the new challenges that are out there. This is one way of seeding that idea in the minds of these up-and-coming leaders.

SD: Is this a one-time thing?

GH: I hope it will be an annual event. For years, business schools have run competitions around new business plans. But this is the first time business schools have invited MBA students to reinvent the organizations in which they are going to work.

SD: What criteria did you use to select the winners?

GH: The criteria we used were: First, is the idea novel? Is it a break with existing management practices? Second, is it doable? Does it seem practical? Does it show sensitivity to the real challenges of making these things happen in a real organization? And thirdly: is it human? How is it going to improve the work life of the people in the organization? What is the human element to this? Does it make the organization more human rather than less human?

The winning entry meets all of those. How do you give every single employee a voice in shaping the destiny of the organization and facing up to the key challenges? In the past, this was thought to be the responsibility of management. This is about democratizing that challenge.

SD: I like the fact that the winning entry is about innovation, which is so central to the challenge of reinventing management. But will management accept new ideas?

GH: The cool thing is that the sponsor of the competition is HCL which has set aside $50,000 of internal budget to try the ideas as a laboratory and then report back. There are a lot of stories out there about really amazing management practices that challenge our assumptions about how decisions are made and who is in control and how do you get coordination to happen. But for many managers, it’s only by accident that you stumble across them, and then only one or two of them.

What we are trying to do in the MIX is bring together or assemble leading edge cases and stories, so as to constitute a real alternative to the status quo, rather than being aberrations that are seen as somewhere out on the fringe.

Once you get enough of these things in one place, then you can start to see that there are very credible alternatives to management as usual. We are hoping that this makes the job of management innovators in an organization a little easier. Our idea is to create a body of examples and potential innovations that companies will find compelling to copy and use.

It’s important to remember that innovators in business don’t always get a platform. Someone may write a story about them in Forbes or Newsweek or whatever. Sometimes it’s difficult for other people to connect with them. So what we are trying to do on the site is to give people a platform and allowing others to reach out to them. In this way, they can find out: “How did you actually implement that really interesting idea? Could you come and talk to my company? If we get together on the phone, can we start to make some genuine connections here?”

SD: The MIX website says that “a revolution in management is brewing”. How quickly will that revolution come?

GH: For several reasons I am very optimistic about change happening. I believe that we will see as much radical management innovation over the next decade as we have seen over the last hundred years. Here’s why.

Companies are up against a set of problems that lie outside the performance envelope of management as usual. They are being compelled to look for answers in new places. They are facing an unprecedented amount of change. Not just change at the margins, but change that challenges the deepest assumptions of their business model. So they are having to come to grips with the fact that the top down structures that give an undue share of voice to people who have most of their emotional equity invested in the past—that is fundamentally toxic. The question is: how do you adapt and change rapidly?

They are living in a world of bare-knuckled competition. They understand that the only way you can grow and protect your margins is by innovation.

The current workplace is not always perceived as very sympathetic to the people who work there. And we are moving into a creative economy where what you need out of your employees is not just diligence and intellect, but also creativity and passion. Firms understand that existing management models are likely to squelch that, rather than reward it.

These inescapable challenges are forcing firms to think in new ways. And we have all of these new tools, thanks to the web, that allow us to push authority down, to syndicate the work of managing out to the periphery of the organization. So we have tools that the early management pioneers could not have even imagined.

And we have this next generation of employees coming in, who have grown up on the web. They have grown up in a world where ideas compete on an equal footing, where it’s your contribution that matters, not your credentials. Those folks are going to want to work in organizations where the internal social reality matches the reality of the web. Companies who don’t get that are simply not going to be able to hire the best people.

So all of those things coming together: new problems, new tools, and new expectations: that’s a perfect soup, a perfect culture in which management innovation can really grow.

SD: Where are we in the process of reinventing management?

GH: This is the beginning. There are some vanguard organizations out there. Not a lot of them. But if you think about modern management getting invented between 1890 and 1920, and over that period, Taylor and others invented task design, calculation, divisionalization, pay for performance, financial reporting, and so on. If you think about those thirty years when most of the fundamentals were created from 1890 to 1920, we are now about at 1895. We are five years into a thirty year transition.

There are long ways to go, but as you look back over industrial history, you can see that the winners are the management pioneers. Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard.

We will look back in ten years and ask: who weathered these changes best? We will find that it’s those who evolved their management model and made them more adaptable, and made them more inspiring places to work and made them more socially accountable,

Slowly executives are waking up to that reality. They are beginning to see themselves not only as decision makers but as social architects responsible for architecting the sorts of values and collaborative systems that help their organizations become as innovative and adaptable as they are efficient and disciplined. It’s a great time to be thinking about these problems.

Krishnan Chatterjee, HCL’s CMO

SD: What was your goal in sponsoring the HCL MBA M-Prize?

KC: HCL, a founding sponsor of the MIX, had set out to design an M-Prize that would elicit the views of MBA students on a challenge CEO Vineet Nayar had set for HCL: How do you create an organization in which responsibility for change is transferred from top management to front-line employees?

This is a basic tenet of our five-year-old ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ experiment. And we wanted to see what ideas challenging the management status quo Gen Y business students would come up with. Business schools are creative hotbeds of management thinking and places where radical concepts like ‘Employees First’ are likely to find enthusiastic early adopters.

By making a pilot program part of the contest and allowing the winners to test their idea within HCL, the company hopes to encourage MBAs’ questioning of accepted management practices, as well as potentially benefit from being an early adopter of the winners’ idea.

And the winners are …

The overall winner was:

Late Night Pizza: Extending Hackathons Beyond Technology, by Alka Tandon and David Roth of Harvard Business School. David and Alka, both management consultants in their pre-B-School lives, were inspired by the problem of the lost tacit knowledge in the heads of colleagues who intersected infrequently. Time pressures inherent in the project-based world of professional services meant that insights gained on the front lines by consultants would only slowly, if at all, diffuse across the organization. Their solution is an adroit adaptation of the Hackathon innovation event concept, already popular among technology companies, for professional services.

The two runners-up were:

IMD Team #10 offer The organisation structure as free market, a radical re-imagining of the traditional employee-manager relationship, in which the employee selects the manager, who is in turn rewarded with budget and scope in proportion to the results his or her team produces.

LBS Group 10 suggests companies should Stop incremental change and foster "Bold Moves", by requiring teams proposing major initiatives to offer at least one 'bold move scenario' that consciously escapes the gravity of incremental analysis.

The other four finalists were:

Can your organisation "handle the truth"?, Mark Young of Massey University in New Zealand imagines applying the Fishbowl technique to making corporate communications more transparent and direct, even when the news is bad.

Performance vs. capability - what's the difference? from Shelley McIvor of Warwick University in England proposes daily real-time polling of employees' engagement levels to compress the typically annual cycle of evaluating the degree to which "10/10" of potential contribution is being inspired.

About Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School and Director of the Management Lab. He is also the Innovation Architect at the MIX, where he oversees the site's strategic direction.

Hamel's landmark books, Leading the Revolution and Competing for the Future, have appeared on every management bestseller list and have been translated into more than 20 languages. His latest book, The Future of Management, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in October 2007 and was selected by Amazon.com as the best business book of the year. The Wall Street Journal ranked him as the world's most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him "the world's leading expert on business strategy."

About Krishnan Chatterjee

Krishnan Chatterjee is Vice President and Head of Global Marketing at HCL Technologies. He has the overall responsibility of building HCL’s marketing strategy and infrastructure to propagate demand creation, ensure an intent-driven business approach, and create a superior customer experience. In his five year stint with HCL, he has been successful in building a unique identity and market positioning for HCL. He is an active blogger who can be reached at www.krishnanchatterjee.blogspot.com.